Don’t sweat the temporary stuff – Downtime won’t hurt search rankings

The latest Webmaster Help Channel video shares good news for marketers sweating over their website performances – a little downtime won’t hurt their web content‘s search rankings in the long run. In the clip, Search Engineer Matt Cutts tells SEOs that they won’t be penalized with lower positions in SERPs if their hosts are down for a day and they receive an error message saying Googlebots can’t access the site.

“If it was just for a day, your site should be in pretty good shape. If your host is down for two weeks – then there’s a better indicator that the website is actually down and we don’t want to send users to a website that’s actually down,” Cutts elaborates.

That being said, publishers must remember that content marketing efforts will fall flat if they don’t cover the basics first. Without a fully functioning website that’s visible in search results and easy to navigate, it’s unlikely internet users will find and read branded content published to those pages.

Brafton pays particular attention to components of web performance like site speed, which improve SEO strategy results, user experience and conversions. Check out this blog post from a Brafton Content Marketing Strategist to learn why site audits are necessary for all company websites and how brands benefit from picking up the pace.

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.